Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... on any of the commercial or bootleg albums only if you are a major fan of the film, because both have considerable flaws that cannot compensate for about five minutes of truly appealing score material. Avoid it... on the commercial album if Elton John makes you sick, and avoid the bootlegs if five minutes of extra, relatively uninteresting score material isn't worth the trouble. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Road to El Dorado: (Elton John/Hans Zimmer/John Powell) As part of Dreamworks' continuing attempt to steal the heart of the animated movie genre away from Disney, the studio followed up their hit film The Prince of Egypt in 1998 with The Road to El Dorado two years later. Despite spirited vocal performances by Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Kline for their characters' adventures in the new world, The Road to El Dorado met the same doom that Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas would encounter a few years later. Audiences spoiled by spectacular leaps forward in animated film graphics and photography tended to shun animations unless they had either spectacular new visuals or, if that failed, fantastic songs. Indeed, The Road to El Dorado would suffer from a lack of advancement in animation technology, and perhaps knowing this fault ahead of time, the producers of the film decided to sculpt the project into a musical extravaganza. With composer Hans Zimmer and his Media Ventures organization established as a tested and successful score producing entity for this genre, the producers decided to team Zimmer once again with songwriter and performer Elton John (the collaboration that had won Oscar gold for The Lion King). With the arrival of John came the transformation of the project from a traditional animated musical (which had been the goal of The Prince of Egypt) into a pop-oriented one, as The Lion King and Tarzan had been. The film came at a good time for John, who decided to make the film his own personal album release of new songs. When considering the music for the film, he said publicly, "Instead of just having the usual five songs on a soundtrack album and the rest of it being score, let's make an album out of this and include songs we wrote that didn't make the movie." So out the window went the traditional animated musical structure. John would saturate the film and its soundtrack album with semi-relevant material, using it as a platform for his own promotion. As such, it foreshadowed the exact problem that would plague Brother Bear a few years later, with the re-teaming of Tarzan duo Phil Collins and composer Mark Mancina yielding an album that really functioned as only a Collins affair. Not only did this John-emphasized structure push Hans Zimmer's role for The Road to El Dorado down to a minimal level, but it also failed to sustain a film which flopped despite John's music. This heavy emphasis on the songs left Zimmer and his associate for the project, the up and coming animation composer John Powell, with less to accomplish. Their score was scattered throughout the film in mostly 2-minute segments, and this left them with an inability to establish a dominant theme or stylistic personality for the score. Thus, what little score there existed became an uncoordinated sampling of different Media Ventures sounds; veteran film music collectors will easily be able to distinguish Zimmer's style from Powell's, the latter of which would largely inform his subsequent work in the genre. Zimmer wrote the "cool" sequences requiring lazy, Caribbean-style rhythms with soft percussion and acoustic guitar. The most notable piece by Zimmer, "Chelorado," features the easily listenable, somewhat loungey guitar work of Heitor Pereira, and has a swing (and several chord progressions) that sounds like a page taken directly from the song "I'd Be Surprisingly Good for You" in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. Zimmer also composed the cues that exhibit a slight Latin edge, and when his techniques aren't cliche in their reorganization of ideas from the similarly Latin-flavored score from James Horner for The Mask of Zorro, they tend to be rather mundane. Powell contributed to the more outwardly creative, full ensemble cues, including "To Shibala," which stirs memories of the vocals from the end of John Williams' Star Wars: The Phantom Menace but does offer a beautiful string interlude, "Save El Dorado," the most typical, keyboarded Media Ventures action cue complete with seemingly electronic string mixes, and "The Ball Game," an insufferably overenthusiastic Mexican-rhythmed dance number. Most Zimmer and Powell fans base their complaints about The Road to El Dorado not on the content of the music, but rather the lack of that material featured on the commercial album. But the bigger complaint should be that the mismatched styles in the highly disparate score cues don't create a cohesive whole. There is no theme, no passion, no motif, no element to remember and take away from their contribution to this film. The John songs are their own entity as well, with only the song "The Panic in Me" featuring some of Zimmer's writing (from "Chelorado"). The rest of John's music has nothing to do with the score, and it has painfully little to do with the Latin flavor of the film. In short, it's a commercialized pop-song disaster. When you combine this bad musical chemistry with the uninspiring visuals in the film, you end up with a total dud. The commercial album is likewise a daunting item to tolerate. Instead of releasing a thousand different albums for The Road to El Dorado (as had been done with The Prince of Egypt), the powerful influence of John caused the soundtrack to be packaged and advertised as "Elton John's The Road to El Dorado," like a solo album with no composition credits given to Zimmer or Powell anywhere on the outer packaging. Several of the John songs on the album aren't even related to the picture. A few are remixes, and one in particular, the duet with Randy Newman, is an embarrassment. The film version of that particular song, "It's Tough to Be a God," is not presented. Twelve or so minutes of material by Zimmer (two cues) and Powell (three cues rolled into a suite) are offered as an afterthought, and they are too brief to satisfy a score collector. The surprising aspect about The Road to El Dorado (for you score fans in an uproar over this) is that there is not that much unreleased score from this film. Zimmer and Powell simply did not write much material for the production. Nevertheless, with Media Ventures music often filtering out in bootleg form (and it's tough to tell if these are originally promos that quickly spiral out of control into bootlegs), a more complete album was inevitable. The first bootleg of 2001 was a 37-minute expansion of material straight from the film and a few extra score cues by both Zimmer and Powell. A second bootleg, a little less polished, then emerged at 60 minutes and offered the previous bootleg in combination with the commercial song album (plus the Japanese release bonus song), making for arguably a more complete presentation of music from the film. The extra Powell and Zimmer score on these bootlegs only amounts to about five extra minutes of music (most notably the cues "Spain 1519/Tulio & Miguel" and "The Gods are Here!!!"). Even extreme Zimmer collectors should be aware that these cues aren't worth the trouble, and score fans would best be served by simply writing off all of The Road to El Dorado as a loss and move on.
Bootleg #1 (14 tracks): ** Bootleg #2 (18 tracks): *** Overall: ** Track Listings (American Commercial Album):
Total Time: 62:08
Track Listings (Japanese Commercial Album):
Total Time: 65:57
Track Listings (Bootleg #1, HZCD-012LR):
Total Time: 37:02
Track Listings (Bootleg #2, RTCD-7443-02):
Total Time: 60:12
All artwork and sound clips from The Road to El Dorado are Copyright © 2003, Dreamworks Records (American), Polygram (Japan), Bootlegs. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 10/9/03, updated 3/22/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2003-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
American Commerial
